Personal Trainer & Nutritionist
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Are you at a restaurant and wondering how to count the calories from your food? How can you find out how many calories are on your plate without a scale and nutritional information? In this article, I’ll show you 3 tips that will help you easily count calories from dishes at restaurants!
#1 Find similar dishes
If you use a calorie counting app, you can see if there are similar dishes. Dishes from large chain restaurants are often listed on calorie counting apps like MyFitnessPal or Fatsecret. If you don’t find your dish there, you can try to find something similar. It’s not 100% accurate, but it’s very close in many cases.
#2 Break down dish into ingredients
Looking at a plate with many different foods can be overwhelming and confusing. However, if you split up the dish, you can find the individual ingredients and enter them separately into the calorie counter app. While you can’t do it to the gram without a scale, there are options for specifications like cups, spoons, etc. You can also go by taste to roughly estimate the amount of oil and fat in the food.
#3 Rounding up and down calories
No matter how good we are at estimating calories, sometimes we’re not quite sure. If you still want to make sure you’re staying within your calories, you can round up or down depending on your goal. If you need a calorie deficit to lose fat, you can round up the calories. If you need a calorie surplus to build muscle, you can round down the calories.
Conclusion
Counting calories in a restaurant is possible and easier than it looks at first glance. It is important not to be a perfectionist, as it is always an estimate. When you eat out, you can’t do it 100% accurately like you can at home with a scale. Estimating calories takes practice and the more often you do it the better you will get.
Did this article help you with calorie counting? Feel free to share your experience in the comments, I look forward to sharing with you. If you have any other questions about calorie counting in restaurants, you can ask me there too, I’ll be happy to help!
